Dark Meditation
by Pandastacia
Summary: "Don't grow up." Non-massacre; ItaSakuSasu!friendship.


**Title:** Dark Meditation; or Bubble Tea; or Frogs and Graham Crackers  
**Dedication:** To Abby; I still remember my last words to you, not with guilt over what I know they could've meant to you but wishing I'd had something better to leave you with.

So here.

See you later.

* * *

When they say she'd passed away, Sakura sees in the small window of her mind a slim body lying in bed, supine and silent, the life having left her in one sudden swoop like a wrung out sponge. She can visualize closed eyes and relaxed hands that weren't in fists for once, the end a result of some congenital defect.

The appearance is natural, but Sakura is too afraid to find the root cause, so in the end they just bury the body with the rest.

It's in the middle of the war and no one has time to grieve.

Only later, when the kunai have been set aside, does Sakura realize that "passing away" is so submissive, passive like small molecules passing through the bilayer phospholipid membrane, and so unlike…

A bitter smile tugs on her lips like a child on a hand, a marionette dangling on silver strings.

Shinobi and kunoichi fight because if they don't, who will?

That is why, when Itachi and Sasuke come looking for her, Sakura is putting together medical kits for every team in the village. The bandages spill over the mesh and leather bags as Sakura keeps her head down and intent on her hands, rolling the cloth into tubes. She sighs, unravels and redoes it, sighs again and does it again and again until the rolls are so small they can fit in a palm, a story and testament to her forced attention and shrunken thinking. Her ANBU team watches her from around the corner; she feels their eyes, but pretends she's too engrossed and that they're not important enough to warrant her attention.

She finishes the fifth bag, topping it off with ointments against topical poisons and that is when they choose to slide closer. Her hand is raw from gripping and pulling against the rolls, and they grab them, even when she winces. If anything, when she pulls away, they hold tighter.

"What? These kits aren't going to put themselves together."

Sakura meant to snap, but her voice is a fraction of itself. In fact, she is only a part of herself, and she doesn't know why it hits so hard. It isn't like she'd really known her well – the girl'd just made chunin and Sakura ANBU around the same time. She'd had everything right before her…

Through a veil of unwanted tears, she watches Itachi and Sasuke nod before Itachi slides them through a transportation jutsu. They sweep her into a bed – not hers, it doesn't smell like her apartment with its stale air, but of ash and Mikoto's cooking. She feels dwarfed in the pillows, especially when the brothers look down on her with their faces closer to sadness and pity than their usual cloud of somberness.

"I'm fine," she pretends to tell them, but her eyes are fluttering shut and she's drifting away, down through the layers of memory.

* * *

.

.

.

* * *

They're sitting in front of the one bubble tea stall near the Hokage tower.

"Ne, Sakura-chan, how old are you?" Moegi asks between hard sucks on her straw. Her ginger hair is still tied up in two high pigtails, but her eyes are wider than usual, like she's fighting sleep.

"Twenty-two," Sakura says. "Why?"

"I was just wondering…"

She raises an eyebrow. "How old did you think I was?"

"I didn't know! I just know you're older than me."

Sakura laughs but she spies a messenger hawk about to alight on their table and rubs her forehead. She can tell that it brings an impending headache with it, and the girl seems to know it, too. "Moegi-chan," she says as she pulls her medical coat back on, "don't grow up."

"Not if I can help it."

Holding her pink hair up with one hand, she waves behind her before tying it up and transporting to the ER.

* * *

.

.

.

* * *

Her eyelids are heavy, like they are holding open the doors of Hell or something equally ridiculous. Sakura can't remember the last time she slept, but at the moment she feels like she could use a few more days.

Slowly, the world focuses in front of her into the darkness that comes just before the sun sets beneath the line of rooftops. She looks directly into the dying light, and wonders where it is that people go after they choose the end, if they go anywhere at all or if they haunt the life they'd thrown away.

"Here."

Sakura turns her head and looks at Sasuke. He places a portable table of food in front of her and holds a pair of chopsticks out to her. She stares at them like she doesn't know what to do with two pieces of wood before looking up at him. Sasuke thrusts them at her again, his face strange in determined indecision, and she slowly grabs them.

"Eat," he commands. He sits down at the chair beside her bed, elbows braced on knees and watches her until she takes a bite.

Then there's another bite, and another, and it's like the rice and soft fish is tumbling into her mouth at will. It's comforting, but in the middle of the race into her belly, Itachi is next to her and holding her hand back. He says slow down, and she tries, at least for them.

"She's only been on soldier pills for the last week," Itachi tells Sasuke, his voice tight.

"A _week_?"

_How is she still alive_ is underwritten somewhere in there, she knows, but she's too focused on easing the gaping hole in her abdomen that demands more sustenance, and more until it's back to shoveling food in her mouth.

This time, Itachi takes the chopsticks from her and feeds her, slowly, while Sasuke goes to get broth from the kitchen.

"I'm not weak," she says, holding the chopsticks back with a hand. Maybe her voice is shaky, but she feeds iron in there.

Believe me, she wants to say, I'm not the girl from back then, but I can still feel and I'm grieving. Just because I don't cry doesn't mean everything isn't okay, it means I'm processing and working through it and I need to _work_ through it. I need to get my feet under me, forgive myself – maybe, I don't know… I'll be okay.

She doesn't say it, though. He doesn't look at her like he disagrees, but she suspects he knows the underpinning of all this.

"Were you close?"

"Not really," she murmurs, sliding back against the pillows and closing her eyes. "I just said something maybe I shouldn't have."

When she awakens, Sasuke's there and Itachi is not. She waits for him to leave, though she suspects that it won't happen.

"It's not your fault." She doesn't know how he can tell she is awake. Her eyes are closed without being pressed shut, her breathing is even, and she is the picture of Sleeping Beauty.

She looks at him, the night deep around him. "I never said it was, Sasuke-kun."

"Then why are you doing this?"

He doesn't compare Moegi to Neji, to Shino, to Asuma – but of course he doesn't. Out of everyone, they all knew that death isn't the same, that it colors the survivors with a different brush.

"Because it's all I can do. All I can do is save someone else."

Because she couldn't save Moegi goes unsaid.

To her surprise, Sasuke grips her hand, light as if he's afraid to break her so she holds on all the harder. His hand is cold against the warmth of the down blankets, but it's familiar and comfortable as his thumb strokes the ridges of her knuckles awkwardly. She watches the play of delicate muscle as he says, "You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved."

Sakura holds onto that, tinkers with it as she slinks back into sleep.

Like the flip of a coin, Itachi is beside her bed the next time she wakes up. She can feel Sasuke laying under the blanket with her and wonders if it's his room. It's too dark to tell and she's too tired to use chakra or just sit up and turn on the lamp. She supposes she could just ask Itachi, but that's not at the forefront of her mind.

"Everyone grieves the young," she whispers. She's looking at the ceiling but she knows it's him the same way she'd known picked him out of the lineup of ANBU in the first test. "You'd think we'd be used to grieving by now, but this…"

It wasn't even in the line of duty, she thinks as she stretches her neck to get the kinks out.

"They're a promise," Itachi says simply.

Sakura tilts her head a bit to look at him only to find him staring steadily at her. "A promise?"

"That the future isn't gone."

Curling into a ball, she faces him. "Is that why it's so sad? That we can't save them from themselves? It's like… Moegi ate herself – like the snake constantly eating its own tail – but she caught her teeth on it and now there's nothing left except…" She blinks until she can see clearly.

It's silent for a few minutes. Sakura chews her bottom lip until it hurts, then she turns to the upper one.

"I can't hate her for it," she says softly.

"Why would you hate her?"

"I don't know. How are you supposed to feel after someone…" She rubs fiercely at the skin by her nose.

"Any way at all."

Itachi says it like it's simple. It doesn't feel like it, though. She just looks at him, the way his face is relaxed, but she thinks that there is a slight quiver to his lower lip when he speaks. Although she thinks she knows where his thoughts are going, she doesn't ask about Shisui and the river. Instead she lets the silence rest on them like a blanket, a captain and the team medic meditating on death in the obscure silence of shinobi night

It is, after all, a congenital defect of life.

* * *

**A/N:** I grieve by writing.

What can I say?

SO to Rhea for being a wonderful beta reader _as always_ fulfilling my neediness.


End file.
